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At this point Jeff Walter, director of Worldwide Environmental Solutions for the HP Imaging and Printing Group, chimed in. “If you look at cartridges, for example, there’s a massive amount of technology both in the print heads as well as there is some physics associated with the foam and the way the ink flows through the print heads, and over time the foam degrades, gets film, et cetera, and what we’ve found is that, of refilled cartridges, about a third of them wind up failing.”

Even Walter admitted the allure of the idea. “Trust me, we’ve looked again and again and again: Can we refill? Can we remanufacture?”

“Yeah,” Gingras laughed. “Because we want to know: Can we do it, too?”

“We look at this all the time,” Walter continued, “and we cannot figure out a way to do it that provides the same quality. Customers expect, fundamentally, 100% of the time, that the printer’s gonna work. So every time you get the failure rates, you get the poor quality, which then offsets any manufacturing benefits of the remanufacturing or refilling.”

So why not just replace the print heads?

“It depends on the system,” Walter told me, “and then you still have the ink flow, foam…”

Gingras added, “And for printing, much of the technology, I think 70% of the technology, is actually in the print cartridge, because that’s where the nozzles are fired at four, six picoliters, very small drops.”

Rich Wirick, the plant manager for the Smyrna facility, took this opportunity to join in the conversation. “You can only refill something, even the [remanufactured ink cartridges], you can only refill a certain amount, once or twice or whatever it is… Even they can’t get it to work after that.”

“And if they can’t refill it, it’s going to a landfill,” said Walter. “Versus us, nothing goes into a landfill.”

It was up to Gingras to steer the discussion back on point. “The great thing about [HP’s process] is that we can recycle a cartridge an infinite number of times.”

Most of the rest of the afternoon was spent trying to prove this, particularly on the tour Wirick gave us through the 80,000-square-foot facility. Though I didn’t love all the protective gear I had to wear — a fluorescent vest, a hard hat, steel shoe tips (for climbing onto the machines), earplugs, and rubber gloves (I’d rather, gasp, wear a suit to the office) — it was fascinating to explore how the cartridges are received, sorted (almost entirely by machine, to the tune of tens of thousands per hour), then either disassembled or shredded before the pieces are sent off to be mixed with other resins and additives (such as recycled plastic water bottles) to form new print cartridges. And, Wirick was careful to note, because of the “closed-loop” recycling process, very few — if any — of the cartridge parts end up in landfills the way HP does things. So that’s good.

But the chances are good that the refilling conversation won’t be going away anytime soon. It’s been persisting for years. HP devotes pages on its website to its anti-refill arguments. And The New York Times reported back in 2006 that HP “went after Cartridge World [a seller of refilled ink cartridges]… for using ink that infringes on patents for its Vivera line of inks” and filed a lawsuit against a company called InkCycle, which made refilled cartridges for Staples, “asserting that the company had violated three patents covering fast-drying ink for plain paper and methods for preventing color from bleeding on paper.”

“So if the ink used by the reputable refillers is good enough to provoke Hewlett’s lawyers,” the Times story concluded, “it should be O.K. to use with confidence, right?”

Six years on, that remains a good question. And given the high price of new cartridges (just on Amazon, a single new cartridge of one style costs about $15, for which you can get three or four remanufactured units from other companies), it’s one that HP — and other printer companies — will continue to have to deal with, now and in the future.

Have you had good luck (or any luck) buying refilled or remanufactured print cartridges, or even refilling your own cartridges? Leave a comment below and let me know. Or, if you’ve successfully pursued the optimal solution — readjusting your computing life as much as possible so you need to print rarely if ever — let me know that, too. I’ve been working on that for a while, though more owing to issues of convenience than of environmental awareness or outrage over the price of ink.

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